Should government-funded research be free?

A new Senate bill would require most federally-funded academic research to be …

Is it fair for the government to fund scientific research, only to have that research locked up in a US$300 academic journal? Senators Cornyn (R-TX) and Lieberman (D-CT) don't think so, and they've got a plan to change the current system. That plan is the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (PDF), a new bit of legislation making its way through the senate. The bill mandates that most federally funded research be freely published online after publication in an academic journal.

The bill contains a few caveats, though: such publication won't take place until at least six months after an article appears in a journal, and it won't necessarily be an exact copy of the journal article. If the publisher refuses to allow for a copy from the journal, the author's own copy of the paper's final version will be used instead.

The new bill comes after a voluntary trial of a similar system at the National Institutes of Health failed pretty spectacularly last year. Less than four percent of papers paid for with government money were submitted to the NIH.

It doesn't take a college graduate to imagine that journal publishers don't like the idea. Brian Crawford, who chairs the Professional Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (that must be one wide business card), says of the plan:

"Mandating that journal articles be freely available on government Web sites so soon after their publication will be a powerful disincentive for publishers to continue these substantial investments."

Not surprisingly, the plan is quite a bit more popular with universities and libraries, who now pay journal subscription fees that sometimes border on the obscene.

Though we in the Orbiting HQ now breathe recycled air and enjoy various zero-g antics, many of us spent our terrestial years haunting graduate libraries and filling out grant applications, so this is an issue near and dear to us—and we are of two minds about it. On the one hand, it hardly seems right for the government to fund research, then to pay a private company for access to that research (which is what happens at most public universities). There's an argument to be made that if taxpayers foot the bill, they should have access to the product.

On the other hand, the journals do provide some valuable services. One of their most important functions is to coordinate the peer review process, one of the cornerstones of contemporary academic research. But they're also useful because they sort information; one soon learns what to expect from, say, English Literary History. By throwing all of their research into a big pile, government-run web sites might make it difficult to find articles of interest and value. And the argument about "the government paid, so it should be free!" breaks down when we consider analogous situations. Just because your local government funded that new baseball stadium, for instance, doesn't mean they're going to give you free tickets—or even a discount. It's also worth pointing out that federal funding often doesn't cover the entire cost of the research, and it certainly doesn't pay the journal's real editorial and printing expenses.

The bill is certainly intriguing, but it's not yet clear 1) whether it can pass and 2) whether it's good for research. With Europe considering a similar system, it may be only a matter of time before someone tries this on a large scale and we see if it works—then publishes the results in a peer-reviewed journal.